“Виховання Кіра” Ксенофонта й “Історія Римської держави після Марка Аврелія” Геродіана: структурна подібність через століття давньогрецької історіографії (огляд рецепцій у сучасній класичній філології)

Abstract

The present article is an attempt to analyze the narrative strategies and scope of Xenophon’s “Cyropaedia” and Herodian’s “History of the Roman Empire” as viewed within the modern reception in classical philology. This paper presumes that the narrative techniques of writing historiographical biographies in antiquity might be the same across the whole period which separates the two works in question. The distance in time did not result in radical changes of the narrative structure in historiography, as the example of Xenophon’s “Cyropaedia” and Herodian’s “History” shows. The analysis of the ancient histories, as this article argues, can be conducted not only to understand the level of their factual reliability, but also to describe their possible impact on contemporary readers or listeners. It is also shown in the present article that the narrative structure of the two histories is far from being that of the non-fictional prose, and that modern classicists tend to consider them as fictional texts. Moreover, the whole ancient historiography, unlike the modern one, has to be treated as fiction, for the strategies of creating it were similar to the narrative strategies of other genres.